Music When Soft Voices Die (Fantasy and Horror Classics)

By John Keir Cross

John Keir Cross was a popular mystery author of the mid-20th century. Originally published in The Other Passenger: Eighteen Strange Stories, 'Music When Soft Voices Die' is one of his best-regarded tales. Many of the earliest occult stories, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781447499688

Book preview

JOHN KEIR CROSS

John Keir Cross was born in Scotland in 1911. He worked as an insurance clerk, and may even have been homeless for a portion of his life, working as a travelling ventriloquist to make ends meet before turning to writing. Throughout his life he frequently wrote under the pseudonyms Stephen MacFarlane and Susan Morley. Although most of Cross’ fiction was aimed at children, in his day he was quite a sought-after writer of supernatural fiction. His 1944 collection The Other Passenger is particularly popular, containing one of his most widely anthologised stories, ‘The Glass Eye’, in which a ventriloquist is confused with his dummy, as well as ‘Esmeralda’, ‘Hands’ and ‘Music When Soft Voices Die’. Mr Bosanko: And Other Stories, published in the same year, is also relatively well-known. Of the nine novels he penned, Cross’ The Angry Planet was probably his most successful. Towards the end of his life, Cross was co-writer on the daily radio show The Archers for five years, and edited a number of anthologies of horror stories.

Music When Soft Voices Die . . .

John Keir Cross

I

I heard of the death of Sir Simon Erskine some five years ago, when I was taking a long holiday in my beloved Scotland. I had known him quite well – a terrible man, moody, powerful, irascible. They said he was only forty-eight when he died. Yet, when I had last seen him, about two years before, at the time of the tragic death of his young wife, he had seemed at least eighty. I remember him then, standing in the porch of that huge, bleak house of his, a brooding and lonely figure, holding tight about him the black cloak he favoured, his already white hair blowing round his temples in the eternal winds of that wild corner of Perthshire. He was the last survivor of the Pitvrackie Erskines – the Black Erskines, as they had been called in the old Covenanting days: stern, merciless, religious men, who believed (if truth be faced) in hellfire and damnation and not much else. It was one